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Monday, 13 January 2014

"His Last Vow," Part 2: Women, eh?

The role of female characters in this episode was, well... holy shit.
To break it down, we have six women: Mary, Molly, Janine, Mrs Hudson,
Sherlock's mother, and Lady Smallwood. Lady Smallwood's role was
essentially that of a typical crime show guest actor, and Mrs Hudson and
Sherlock's mother both had pleasant, relatively unimportant maternal
roles. The three recurring female characters who were actually important
to the plot were all linked by two traits. Firstly, they're all
romantically linked to one of the two male leads, and secondly, the
events of this episode transformed each of them from being independent humans
to acting like orbiting satellites, helpless to the gravitational pull of Sherlock's
personal storyline.

Tens of thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands) of words have been written by Sherlock and Doctor Who fans, attempting to decode Steven Moffat's unsettling attitude to women. Considering the kinds of things he's said during official publicity interviews,
it's difficult to argue that he isn't something of a misogynist.
And this regularly shines through in his writing, partly thanks to his
repeated use of a very specific fantasy formula when it comes to writing
central female characters. This season of Sherlock provided some very
interesting examples in this regard, because while Moffat and Gatiss
certainly collaborate on their scripts, His Last Vow was the only
episode that had Moffat as the primary writer. In other words, the main
plot points and characterisation details in the first two episodes were
not governed by Moffat's headcanon. Gatiss and Thompson's job was to set
up Mary and Janine as characters we would find engaging and likeable, in preparation for
Moffat's plan to tear them down and ~reveal their true natures~ in episode three.

Now,
obviously this was all planned from the beginning, but I still find it
telling that the series overview basically boiled down to this: "We need
to introduce two new awesome female characters and then utterly screw
them over and make sure their existence revolves around John and
Sherlock."One of the most common criticisms regarding Moffat Women is that he creates female characters who seem to exist
purely to support a male hero. Or, more accurately, he
creates interesting female characters who are later proven to
exist only to support a male hero. In Doctor Who: River
Song, Clara Oswald, and The Girl in the Fireplace. In Sherlock: Irene
Adler, Mary, Janine, and to a certain extent, Molly, who in this episode
saw her engagement broken off (offscreen!) and her role in the episode reduced to that of a helpful assistant inside Sherlock's Mind Palace. On
an individual basis, none the female characters in His Last Vow are
enormously problematic. You can rationalise them. Sherlock's mother gave
up a career in mathematics to have children? Fine. Lots of people give up their careers to
have kids. Mary used to be an assassin, and will do anything to keep her
past a secret so John won't leave her? Well, that's kind of fucked up,
but romantic in its own way. Janine is surprisingly unbothered by the
fact that her boyfriend was using her to get into her boss's office, and
faked their entire relationship? Admirably pragmatic. The problem only
arises when you combine all of these together, especially when
you have any awareness of the kind of things Steven Moffat has said
about women and female characters in the past. Let's look at Mary and
Janine, the two women who went from being normal people to being cogs in
the John-and-Sherlock storyline machine:

Janine: I said in last week's review that I liked Janine, but
found it very odd that Sherlock would be so pleasant to her. Well, now
we have a satisfying explanation for Sherlock's uncharacteristically friendly attitude! However, her reaction to Sherlock's
betrayal is pure fantasy. Rather than reacting in the way that 99% of
humans would have done, her personality was specially constructed to absolve
Sherlock of his sins and allow the audience to forgive him for acting
like a colossal douchebag. It's OK! She's a "whore" who got even by
selling her story to the tabloids! So it's totally OK that Sherlock lied
to her and used her throughout their entire relationship.

Mary: Were it not for the John/Mary/Sherlock scene at Baker
Street, I might have accepted the revelation that Mary is a former
CIA assassin. It's hardly the most ridiculous thing that's ever
happened in this show, after all. But during that scene, I found myself
viewing the characters with a strange kind of double vision: they were
no longer just people, but also mouthpieces for the writer. As one of my
friends put it: This episode says so much about Moffat's views on women that it's actually shocking.
John's first reaction to Mary's betrayal is to say, "What have I ever
done to deserve you?" and then "You weren't supposed to be like this!"
which starts off a whole conversation about how of course John was attracted to Mary, because she is not a Normal Woman, she is Special and Exciting.

Everything is about John. Mary's presence in the show is the result of
John's life up until this point, and it's really just as well that we
got a nice, neat scene where Sherlock helpfully explains John's own
personality traits to him, so we all know that John and Mary are Made
For Each Other. Or, more accurately, that Mary is Made For Him, what
with her conveniently being Very Exciting on top of her original
appealing traits of being Feisty and shockingly tolerant of Sherlock's
nightmarish behaviour.

If you think I'm overreacting a little here, please allow me to digress for a moment on the topic of Moffat Women. Do you guys watch Doctor Who? I assume many of you do, but if you don't, let tell you the story of River Song.

River
Song was introduced as a guest character in Steven Moffat's excellent
double episode, Silence In The Library, back when Russel T. Davies was
still showrunner. She's a smart, sexually liberated, confident,
middle-aged archaeologist/adventurer -- who, it turns out, is married to
the Doctor. They seem to have a really cool relationship where she
lives her own life as a kind of intergalactic Indiana Jones, and
occasionally meets up with the Doctor whenever he's having an adventure
in her corner of the galaxy.

But
as the series progressed and Steven Moffat took over as showrunner,
the truth of River's backstory was gradually "revealed." Rather than being an
independent entity who fell in love with the Doctor, it turned out that
she was secretly the daughter of two of his companions. On top of this, she was "programmed" to hunt down the Doctor and assassinate him. When she meets him
for the first time in her timeline, she decides not to kill him, and
instead gives him a ton of her own life-force in order to save his life,
which effectively downgrades her from near immortality to a normal
human lifespan. Then, she becomes an "archaeologist" in order to
research the history of the Doctor, because she knows their lives are intertwined, and it's the only way she can learn more about him while he's free to travel around space and time without her. Eventually she is imprisoned
for "killing" him, and they only spend time together he arrives at her
prison to pick her up for a fun adventure in space, and then delivers
her back to be locked up again. When she dies, the Doctor has her
consciousness stored in a computer so she can "live forever," trapped in
a utopian (but extremely dull) CGI garden with various other stored
consciousnesses.

Mary and Janine's character
development was a microcosm of this evolution from independent character
to obsessive follower. I still like Mary a lot, but it's annoying to
learn that instead of just being, you know, a person, she has to
be this Very Special And Important superspy who is willing to shoot
Sherlock in the chest to protect her relationship with John. She's a
near-perfect example of the Steven Moffat formula for central female
characters: feisty and powerful and "fun" until we discover that her
entire role in the show is hopelessly tied up in the male hero's
existence, and has been since before she even appeared onscreen. A far
more emotionally authentic character journey would've been if she was just an ordinary person who is in love with John, rather than an
infamous assassin with a Dark Past who is hopelessly embroiled in a
conflict with Sherlock's latest arch-nemesis

Which
brings me on to the weirdest aspect of Mary's revelation: the fact that
she doesn't seem to care if Sherlock lives or dies. She evidently likes him,
but I'm of the opinion that no matter what Sherlock said about her
ability to shoot, she was completely willing to kill him in Magnusson's
office. I think it's reasonably likely that if Sherlock hadn't set up
that scene in that corridor behind the facade, she might have made another
attempt to kill him, just to avoid John discovering her secret. But as
soon as John knew, she no longer had any reason to silence Sherlock, so
she could go back to her original position of finding him likable and entertaining on a personal level. John, inexplicably, is perfectly OK with staying
married to a woman who shot his best friend in the chest, but I
genuinely can't tell if this was intentional or if it was just another
example of the extremely uneven characterisation this season.

5 comments:

I think the main thing with Mary is that we just need more of her. Like you say, everything potentially problematic about her could be rationalized away, if only we just knew more about her. I don't necessarily need or want to know about her assassin life, but why did she retire? How did she and John meet? We know why John was attracted to her, but why does she love him so much that she'd murder to keep him from getting hurt? I'd frankly be satisfied on the "later proven to exist only for a man" front if it turned out that they met and fell in love in completely innocuous circumstances, and Mary never expected her past life to ever be relevant again. From the viewer's perspective, Mary would still appear as this "shocking!!" plot device, but from a narrative one, she'd be a more independent/separately realized character.

To me, Mary seems like a female version of Sherlock (she is obviously socipath or even psycopath). They are both broken emotionaly, they both think end justifies the means and both would kill one another if necessary. And they both care for John who is a good person, but still tainted enough to accept them.